| Jeremy Irons wears Saville Row, rides a chauffeured limousine, drinks whisky from cut glass, as a goose wears down. Born to it. And Louis Malle always displays the glory and horror of passion just like a Frenchman, with discretion and Grand Guignol in equal measure. Taste, they call it.But Juliette Binoche - not since Ingrid Bergman has sadness been so exciting. Her tears taste of chocolate and strawberries. She wears sexuality as a Giaconda mask, and makes a strong case for Da Vinci's muse having been an unwilling purveyor of incestuous fratricide. After this film, it's hard for me <more> to imagine a stronger reason for the Louvre's most famous resident's famous enigma.Malle films with an eye not gimlet, not jaundiced, yet wicked and joyous and deadly as love itself. His casting is irrefutable: movies have had a crush on Rupert Graves since his floppy hair stole scenes in ROOM WITH A VIEW, so who better to crucify on the altar of obsession? Whom would we pity more as the betrayed wife than the multiply reinvented Miranda Richardson, who played the vicious murderess of CRYING GAME and this noble housewife back-to-back? But who would have thought Peter Stormare could play anything like sympathy? And my God - Leslie Caron as the voice of reason? But this is not just gamesmanship. This is a director, too, so in command of his art that I forget completely that it's a movie. The story is all. The colors and textures of costume, set and location, the editing as fine as angel's hair, the loving grace notes in every performance acclaim his power. David Hare, too, deserves more than a little notice. I don't always like his plays: they never seem to me to have enough of the fire of life in them. Perhaps I'm not smart, dull or British enough to appreciate them - I much prefer the stage work of his sometime collaborator Howard Brenton. But what Hare does here with Josephine Hart's McNovel - a sparse if effective series of aphorisms - is simply lovely. There's not much new in the movie, but the moments have a cohesion under Hare that never materializes in the book. He has created his own share of small scenes, a sweet glue defining and shaping the action. The madness of infatuation and the awful thrill of discovery, the vacancy of parents and the callousness of their children, the delirious lethargy of the ruling class - all serve double and triple duty, reflecting theme in moment at every opportunity. Zbigniew Preisner's score illustrates these glimpses with massive delicacy, reminding us once again why American directors prefer the crashing obviousness of James Horner or James Newton Howard. He only allows the blare of saxophone at the climax, a hideous, cheap bray as tawdry as lust.That final moment: that piece of cheese, the lonely psychotic acquiescence of that room - what is it about European artists that makes them so much better able than Americans to deal with the complexities of humanity? Is it the weariness of two thousand years' more time to contemplate the horrors of disaffection? Is it the maturity of possession and loss? All those empires in ruin surely must add domestic perspective. And those, perhaps, are not as enviable as the artistry they spawn. How good and sweet to be a young and virile nation, even stupid, even callow, even in early decline! <less> |
